A rush to judgment was all it took to set in motion an unjust arrest, trial and imprisonment. In Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, Raymond Bonner walks readers through a little-known crime and its subsequent investigation which was marred by police blunders and mismanagement of the crime scene. Further, poor legal representation prevented anything close to a fair trial for the suspect.

In 1982, an elderly white woman in Greenwood, South Carolina was found brutally murdered in her home. The man eventually arrested and convicted for the crime was low-income and African-American. His only connections to the house were a single fingerprint and a few checks from the owner for maintenance work. Yet prosecutors persisted and Edward Lee Elmore was tried, convicted, and served 30 years in prison. Twenty-seven of those years were spent on death row.

The case is meticulously researched by Bonner, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Investigation of the crime scene did not follow official procedures, and Elmore was represented by lawyers who did a shoddy job at best. It was not until 11 years later that Diana Holt, a lawyer working with the disenfranchised, took on his case. Her persistence eventually led to the overturning of Elmore’s death sentence. But it wasn’t until March 2012, just after this book was published, that he was actually released from prison. Anatomy of Injustice is as much a saga of an unsolved case as it is a look at what goes wrong when the justice system is compromised by politics, inefficient lawyers, and a desire to solve a crime at the cost of a fair investigation. A fascinating true crime read, it will also appeal to anyone interested in human rights and the legal process in the United States.